You Can’t Own The Social Web

At the end of his apologia for the Social Web Foundation, Ben Werdmuller says this of what he terms both the growth fediverse and the movement fediverse: “Each group is approaching the problem in good faith.” The foundation’s very name disputes this contention.

Inherent to the foundation’s formulation of itself and of the social web is the argument that the latter did not exist until 2008, when foundation founder Evan Prodromou “made the first-ever post on the social web”, a ludicrous statement I and others already have savaged because of course the web has been social for a very long time.

Ben suggests that there are three primary criticisms of the SWF, the second of which he describes thusly:

It’s called The Social Web Foundation but is focused on ActivityPub, ignoring AT Protocol, Nostr, and other decentralized social web protocols that are emerging elsewhere

No, that’s not it.

It isn’t about competing protocols for decentralized social networking applications. They didn’t call themselves the Social Networking Foundation. The foundation chose “social web” despite the fact that it’s mission is to promote only a very specific kind of web sociality, and what’s more to promote that kind only through a single protocol.

Maybe it will help to think of it this way: the Social Web Foundation is the ActivityPub trade group.

Like many trade groups, this one is named and self-described in a manner deliberately meant to capture and colonize an entire area. To become, in effect, synonymous with what its name names. It shits on twenty-five years of the web.

Imagine if a trade group had formed called the Social Internet Foundation, dedicated to promoting a single form of being social on the internet—say, exclusively focused on NNTP. I’d like to think that folks like Ben would jump to silence that noise in a heartbeat, because it’s self-evident that being social on the internet isn’t limited to a single kind of sociality let alone a single protocol.

Good faith? Their very name is bad faith.

ActivityPub is not the social web. Evan Prodromou was not the first to post to the social web. It is a standardized approach to social networking. That’s fine. Standardization can be a powerful thing.

But I absolutely refuse—absolutely, resolutely, and angrily refuse—to cede to them the idea of the social web they’ve tried to co-opt unto themselves. That simple act, essentially their very first act as an organization, makes them untrustworthy. Or, at the very least, it means they had no one outside their protocol-partisan world look at what they were doing before they did it.

Which amounts to the same thing.